#AboutLastWeek: The world after Brexit, Java EE Guardians at full throttle, Eclipse Neon release train sees the light of day

Each Monday we take a step back and analyze what has happened in the previous week. Last week Britain decided to part ways with the European Union, the Eclipse Foundation announced the Eclipse Neon release train and Java EE Guardians founder talked about the state of Java EE and the future of the group. Plus, we learned that NetBeans IDE 8.2 is now feature complete.

The world after Brexit

Over 17 million people voted in the UK’s EU referendum last week to sever ties with the politico-economic group of 28 (now 27 remaining EU members) and roughly 15.9 million to remain part of the European Union.

London’s tech and startup sector has argued against Brexit, especially since the city is the home of different talents coming from all over the world. Talent is not the only problem though — regulations are likely to create problems for any tech startup or giant that wants to hold on to their offices in Britain.

Brent Hoberman, the co-founder of online travel booking site Lastminute.com, told Forbes that London is a “talent magnet” and companies from all across the world often pitch their tents in the British capital because they consider it the gateway to the EU. That ship has sailed now. Hoberman, who also founded Founders Forum, a community for global entrepreneurs, CEOs, and investors in the digital, media and technology sectors, revealed that his group carried out a survey of several hundred startup founders in Britain and discovered that over 90 percent did not like the idea of Britain leaving the EU. Talent remains one of the biggest reasons why the tech sector dismisses Britain’s decision; most companies import talent not only from Europe, but also from across the world.

Eclipse Neon has arrived

Last week, the Eclipse Foundation announced the Neon release — the annual release train from the Eclipse community. This marks the eleventh year the Eclipse community has shipped a coordinated release of multiple Eclipse projects — this release train features 84 projects and 69 million lines of code with contribution by 779 developers, 331 of whom are Eclipse committers.

Ian Skerrett, VP of Marketing and Ecosystem at Eclipse Foundation told JAXenter.com that the foundation has been “getting better at integrating automated error reporting into Eclipse.In the past year, over 3 million error reports were automatically submitted by over 350,000 individuals. The cool thing is that 7800 problems were fixed based on these error reports. ”

Java EE Guardians open up about the state of Java EE

First, I think the release cycles for Java EE should be between 2-2.5 years. The long release cycles at 3-3.5 years have been a significant competitive weakness for Java EE. The initially announced schedule was far longer than it really needed to be from the start. Second, launching Java EE 8 took far longer than it should have, thus resulting in Oracle declaring a six month delay shortly after launch.

Rahman believes that the community alone can in fact move Java EE forward — if it is the last resort. Even though this is not an easy job, it has been done before.

Meanwhile, Werner Keil, another Java EE Guardian believes that “Java EE 8 is in a very mixed state” and recalls that Java EE was capable of doing things that are now called ‘Social Media’, ‘Cloud’ or ‘Internet of Things’ many years ago.”

NetBeans IDE 8.2

Last week the NetBeans team announced via its mailing lists that NetBeans IDE 8.2 is now feature complete. That means the final phases of the release will begin, including final bug fixes and testing, as well as interaction with the community in the last stretch to the release. Geertjan Wielenga also announced the introduction of ECMAScript 6 editor and opined that the way in which the ECMAScript 6 editor has found its way into NetBeans IDE is almost as interesting as the feature itself.

Blockchain not ready to go mainstream just yet

We also talked to Spiros Margaris, one of the top social influencers in FinTech, about the future of blockchain and Bitcoin and the former’s long-term benefits. The founder of Margaris Advisory believes that blockchain will go mainstream in the next 5-10 years and has faith in Bitcoin.

Of course blockchain has its challenges (costs, scalability, standards, regulation, security, etc.) and it will take time to overcome them but we all know that once we overcome those challenges — which many banks and startups work hard on to do — it will change things for the better in our lives.